Thiruvananthapuram/Kochi, Nov 12 (PTI) The Kerala High Court has allowed an independent Malayalam digital news platform and a farmers’ group, both allegedly critical of the UDF government, to operate their Facebook pages, which had been blocked by Meta.
The CPI(M) on Thursday welcomed the development and accused the V D Satheesan government of censorship.
Referring to the High Court’s directions, the CPI(M) alleged that Satheesan was using the police and administrative machinery to permanently block social media pages critical of his government.
The High Court, on October 9, directed Meta to restore the Facebook page of the Kerala Independent Farmers Association (KIFA), observing that “merely because of the reason that certain posts uploaded by the petitioner (KIFA) on Facebook account are objectionable, the entire account need not be blocked”.
“This will not preclude the 6th respondent (DGP) from giving instruction to the 8th respondent (Meta) for removing any particular post or posts, which is found to be objectionable, but, such removal shall be subject to the final order, to be passed in this writ petition,” the court had said.
The order noted that KIFA’s Facebook page had been blocked pursuant to a direction from the Director General of Police (DGP).
In the case of Malayalam digital news platform NoCap, the government had told the court that it had only asked Meta to “remove certain hateful comments in some of the posts made by the petitioner (chief editor of NoCap)” and had not instructed it to block the platform’s Facebook page.
In view of the government’s submission, the court allowed NoCap to operate its Facebook page after deleting the allegedly objectionable comments flagged by the DGP.
Leader of Opposition in the state Assembly and senior Marxist leader Pinarayi Vijayan said the UDF government was delusional if it believed it could suppress criticism and popular protests through such methods.
The government has not responded to the CPI(M)’s allegations.
In a Facebook post, Vijayan claimed that the High Court order had revealed the “true colours” of the CM, who had recently told reporters that it was not such “a big deal” that criticism against him needed to be removed from Facebook.
He alleged that while Satheesan had offered to write to Meta on behalf of the media to reinstate pages blocked for criticising him, he was simultaneously using the police and administrative machinery to permanently block pages critical of his government.
Vijayan said KIFA’s Facebook page had been blocked by Meta on the DGP’s instructions over certain allegedly objectionable posts uploaded on it.
Citing the two High Court orders, Vijayan said Keralam would not tolerate such “authoritarian methods” of silencing critics to conceal administrative failures.
He called for strong resistance against what he described as media hunts and cyber censorship reminiscent of the Emergency.
“No one should think that the right to dissent in a democracy can be countered by police raj,” he added.
His senior party colleague and former state minister P Rajeev also made similar allegations.
In a Facebook post, Rajeev contended that the CM was “a big deal”, citing the High Court orders as indicating that the government was behind the blocking of the Facebook pages of NoCap and KIFA.
Taking a dig at Satheesan, he said Prime Minister Narendra Modi would be only a student in front of him on this issue.
The CPI(M) leader said that during the Left government’s tenure, the KIFA Facebook page had carried significant criticism of the then CM, the Forest Minister and the LDF administration.
He said the KIFA page had congratulated the new government and also carried some criticism of the UDF administration, following which the Facebook page was blocked.
“This is ‘puthuyuga (new generation) Keralam’,” he said, taking a swipe at the UDF government, whose slogan and strategic and developmental vision are centred on ‘puthuyuga Keralam’. PTI HMP SSK
This report is auto-generated from PTI news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.